Construction application of a gen-network : uniform access to standards, products and company information

Abstract: "Facing an increasing competitive environment where flexibility and adaptability to change are the obliged route to success, building and construction companies have to continuously renew their working habits while keeping business processes under quality, time and cost control. In the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) domain, the wide diversity in terms of the object built, but also associated to the geographical dispersion of actors and building sites makes such an agility even more crucial. Considering the design and tendering phase of a construction operation, the architects and construction engineers have to efficiently select the manufactured products that will best suit the project while complying to its numerous constraints. Beyond the functionality, performance and cost characteristics, a suitable product has also to conform to the applying regulations and standards, be eventually accompanied with a corresponding technical agreement, offer acceptable delivery solutions on the building site. Moreover, once identified within a manufacturer catalogue, the product has to be integrated into the architect or engineer application desktop, whether it be a CAD, specification writer or quantity take-off application.
Addressing these needs, the Global Engineering Networking (GEN) initiative is promoting the reuse of company internal and external engineering knowledge through the emergence of new kind of global market places where actors publish and retrieve on-line a wide range of engineering information and services. In particular, The Construction Pilot in EP 22 284 GENIAL project demonstrates over the AEC domain, the relevance of new generation of Information Technology infrastructures supporting the erection of Value-Added Service Provider (VASP) sites that materialise the GEN vision, i.e. allowing information and services to smoothly be retrieved where required whilst the succeeding company is concentrating on its core competencies. With such an infrastructure, whether it is through material, performances, manufacturer, regulation or price discrimination, the appropriate component, document or service is rapidly and cost effectively brought on the designer desk for the best value of the overall project. On the other side of the communication pipe, the supplying partner gains the opportunity of reaching an enlarged audience as IT now commonly break any geographical distance.
In practice, three major information publishers and a building contractor in Europe initiate the GEN network in the AEC domain through the erection of VASP sites offering product, company or document related information. User queries are governed by various standard (EPIC, UNICLASS) or corpus specific (BATIBASE, EDIBATEC) classification systems. Relevance of the overall approach is demonstrated through the presentation of a large variety of such queries for the various information corpuses used : Techcom company and product information, BIC company, product and document, REEF regulation documentary corpus or EDIBATEC product information."